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Makeup Looks

Hello everyone, and welcome back to my blog! I hope you caught my most recent Instagram posts titled “The Greys: Part I” and “The Greys: Part II“. I’d been wanting to do an alien/ET look for a long time, but wasn’t having much success until this time.

If you’re familiar with this post: Makeup Looks – Movies Edition, you have an idea of how I post these things. I’ll create a similar “thread” type post here of looks not associated with movies. For my first look, we’ll talk about my “The Greys” images.

For those that aren’t aware (or aren’t completely obsessed like me), “Greys” or “Roswell Greys” is the term used to describe the humanoid, grey-skinned extra-terrestrial beings that have supposedly made contact with, abducted, and experimented on humans as far back as 1947. 1947 is the infamous year an alleged other-worldly vehicle crashed in the dessert outside of Roswell, New Mexico (my state!). Since the early part of the last century, these aliens have become popular and recognizable figures in our culture.

Since UFO sightings and alien encounters are such a big part of the World’s consciousness now, I’m surprised I don’t usually see too many alien costumes during Halloween. I thought creating the look with makeup would be really affordable and easy to do yourself at home, especially if you’re trying to do something different than all of the Joker and Harley Quinn looks that will be everywhere you turn this year.

Entering ‘the greys’ into Google, returned plenty of creepy images, but I chose this one as my inspiration. This was pulled from someone’s Pinterest account, so I don’t have artist credits or any other information about the image.

Of course, the biggest issue I wanted to tackle was that my face does not resemble the face above. My jaw and nose are much wider and larger, and my eyes are much smaller. These are of course, the areas I wanted to focus on aside from the wrinkles and texture of the alien’s face.

The popular depictions of aliens are frequently hairless, and making it appear like I didn’t have eyebrows was harder than I thought. I know there is cosmetics grade waxes that you can purchase to cover textures or build up textures on your face. Such a product would have been really helpful for me. Instead, I used some Profusion eyebrow wax which was significantly thinner. It didn’t hold them in place like I would have liked, but at least they were sort of kept in place. I applied this (not my phot0 – I lost my photo of the product) costume paint from Rubie’s, which you can find in lots of stores that carry Halloween items this time of year over my entire face as a base to work with.

Let me just clarify that I do NOT recommend using this face paint. It is incredibly stubborn, doesn’t blend well, doesn’t’ stay put, and is not buildable. Meaning, after you smear it on, there’s really no working with it. It just kind of moves itself around on top of the skin. It was really frustrating but somehow I made it work.

I set the cream with my Airspun translucent powder, trying to make it a little more permanent, and then started adding color to my base with eye shadow. I found the perfect greenish grey shade in a really old Mark. palette from Avon. I then went in with black liner and black eye shadow to place my wrinkles and shadows. I then highlighted with Star and Lucky Clover from the Anastasia Beverly Hills Moonchild glow kit.

For my eyes, I outlined the desired shape with eyeliner, and filled in with black eye shadow. I then added some glitter glue from Star Crushed Minerals, under some black glitter from Ash Shadows.

A mistake I commonly make with photographing my scary makeup looks is photographing in low light. The theory (of mine) has been that it makes them easier to edit, and is more flattering on the makeup. However, when photographing this look, I learned good lighting is better, because editing becomes more minimal afterward. I was ready to take the makeup off, not really feeling sure that I had captured the look the best I could. When I took one last photo in my harsh bathroom lights I noticed how much more vivid the makeup was.

I used the image editor on my Samsung Galaxy S7. I drew in black all around my head to “cut it out”. I then used the app called “Layout” to place black all around, and edited the photo editor one last time to remove any lines or borders. Here is the finished product using different filter settings. The second photo makes the skin underneath my makeup more visible for some reason.

A couple of people who have given me feedback on the photos I posted, said that it looked like a movie poster. That was the best compliment I could have gotten on this look. It took me over 3 hours to do the makeup and get a good photo. I hope you love it as much as they did! It’s great as an artist to look back on something like this with a better understanding of how to improve the look for next time. I’d love to see if any of you decide to recreate this look yourselves!

Check back to this post often, as I’ll be posting additional looks as I get inspired.